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The Gift Horse
The fruit of the Mahtrees of Eden, Before The First Tick, the entire ecology of Eden was photosynthetic/frugivorous. The very first beings to harness photosynthesis are these things called MahTrees. Mahtrees fed through their roots, which passed through the shell formed by the land of Eden, and opened out into the Milieu Intrieu, The GlassLands through which the Light! of the I of GOD shines out from.... Reproducing by cloning, they spread out to virtually cover Eden, a whole forest of them. Under their branches the beasts of Eden gathered from time to time in order to wait for their fruits to drop. When the Rind opened, and the Gift Horses emerged, ready to be eaten, they would take part in their flesh and recieve the message of The Cornucopia. Gift Horses were the first beings to use the body plan known as Man, although before the coming of the Morphord, all Gift Horses were female, like their mothers. With the coming of the Morphord and the opening salvo of The First War, Mahtrees on the other side of Eden sensed the destruction and perversion of their sisters and generated the first Stallions, the Glass Horses, whose purpose was to scout the wastelands created in Eden by the Morphorde and bring back detailed information concerning the Enemy. From their observations, the Mahtrees generated a second wave of Stallions, whose purpose was to preserve by any means necessary the inhabitants and the environment of Eden. So successful were the Stallions at beating back the Morphorde that the Morphord Himself took on the Man body plan when He gathered His legions back to His bosom and cannibalized them to create a form capable of destroying Eden. When He was through, He took the form of a towering Man who drove his foot straight through Eden's protective shell and sank deep into The GlassLands. In this moment, the first worlds were created, populated by the second species to use the Man shape, HuMans. In this moment, the AhMen who survived it found themselves homeless. Eden was gone. When asked, Gift Horses are often evasive about their true purpose within GOD, and as the effects of the Horn disappate after the Horse's departure, Seeder HuMans usually return to their pre-encounter state with only the imprints of the visitation in dreams, or if these Seeders are on a Needy world, nightmares. This evasiveness, and the persistant misinformation that remains around the origins and nature of the Horses, is a result of a convergence of several factors. The destruction of The White Lands obliterated the extensive communications network among MahTrees that existed even up and til The First Tick, and any MahTrees that survived on shards that plunged into the depths of GOD held only what they were holding at the time of The Tick. Entombed, still living, in their fragments of home, the Trees continued with what they retained, leaving some Trees with whole memories of The First War, and other Trees, usually newly sprouted saplings, with nothing but the basic library of two models of Gift Horse and an otherwise complete innocence. Virtually all of contemporary Gift Horses are Second War born, which means their entire identity as a species and as a race has been garbled into virtual indecipherability, apart from in the very rare instance where an Edenic shard is preserving multiple MahTrees intact, with their root system still connected. Any Horse born to such a lucky Shard will have a much better idea of what is going on overall, And any Horse born to such a lucky Shard will therefore have a deeply vested interest in keeping others from finding out. To know too much about Horses is to know too much about Eden, and their own survival depends on maintaining the safety of their Mothers. These Horses will work hard to keep information about themselves scarce and hard to acquire, to maximize the chance of the weakness of their Mothers being discerned or tracked. They will lie, cheat, and manipulate to protect their Shard, and due to the effects of The Wash, they can do so extremely convincingly. But, in most cases, a Horse is born from an orphan shard, where only a single, immature, or perhaps injured Tree is found. These Horses will have no idea what their race's history is. They are almost always not even aware of the existence of their own Mothers. They will only remember The Light! and that they are at war with an overwhelming force that wants to destroy it... They only begin to acquire this knowledge through the process of SpoonMan while they are Foals, knowledge that is fragmented and scrambled. They take the fragments and weave them into a mnemonic framework that they operate in, given context by the worlds they awaken in. In addition, due to the phenomenon known colloquially as 'The Wash', successive reconstitutions by their Mother after The Pact strips Gift Horses of many memories, especially mid-term and long-term memories which are then re-informed by the process of SpoonMan, albeit at a slower rate as the Horse ages. Only beings who stay in steady proximity to the Horse via The Pact are resistant to The Wash, but too prolonged a lapse and a Horse can forget even those they were once close to. The major exception to this is the Horse's Parent, the first HuMan they take nourishment from. "Tell me why were we made? Tell me what we are for. Tell me...what is my purpose, Dust?!" The old Stallion had looked up at her, grizzled and covered in the dust and terrible grime of Red River. 'Don't open your eyes!' Elijah had warned her. 'You won't like what you see. The more you know about GOD...The less Freedom you have.' Her flesh crawled. She thought of the old Feeder, Asad's Tulaq slave, a Blue eyed beast behind her robes and veils...Impossible eyes. Eyes that defied physics both chromosomal and cosmic. Blue roses. Blue eyes. Eyes only Jason Rhode or those of his kin possessed. She remembered Hajara, like Chiya in the way a bat was like an owl...remembered how the skies were terrible overhead, terrible and Red''.'' She could never forget the snarls of her lover as he flung himself again and again at Jason Rhode, the grunts of the WillWorker as he parried and countered. Caine and Able, battling on grease stained sands for the right to possess her flesh, while the ancient Horse lit a cigarette and tossed another long dead log into the campfire, or how the fire had roared in response. Red, Yellow, and Orange, She remembered the story he'd told her as the sounds of the battling Mages echoed across Red River's Desert landscape. He'd told her of the first of the Gift Horses, living in the White time. He'd told her about an impossible Garden...stretching like the Desert, from Horizon to Horizon...about an egg that was White within and Mirror without, all of it nourished by the Light. The Light!The I of GOD Everything ate it, the Light! Everything was sustained by it, and the only death known to its denizens was the strange stillness of sleep. He told her of pools amid the endless trees, bushes, vines, and grasses...pools of Light! that, if you drank from one, would send you into this strange motionlessness, and while you lay in it, you would change somehow. Become...not you. Something else. Some thing else's body...someone else's mind ...simply change... No killing, and no Death. Everything is Everything. GOD was everywhere, everything. Happening, happening, he had said...Now, squared. "Can you really get your head around that, girl? You're sure good at spreading those legs...Can you open up that mindbrain of yours as wide?" She'd been pissed, and had lashed out at him. He'd caught her by her striking wrist, turned it, and her arm, and locked her elbow as he torqued her shoulder...immensely strong... but so unbelievably quick that it wouldn't have mattered to her how strong he was. The fact that he had her, and he held her fast through reversal of her own body's principle angles left her breathless and gasping. Geometry, physics - all of them were weapons. She'd regretted attacking him. He'd thrown her to the side of the campfire onto her back, bloodying her elbows and covering her in the indomitable Red River dust. The old Stallion had cursed as he'd taken his seat again, while she had regained her composure. She wasn't entirely certain why he'd not hurt her worse, but as he'd sat down again, he looked into the flames and told her another story. His voice had taken on a singsong quality, with a cadence that suggested to her that he was summoning from rote memory the words of this tale...there was a distinct detachment to the tell...as if he, the Stallion...did not hold any conviction in the words he was reciting. "My Great, Great, Great grandmother..." He began, "followed Edam and Eve, as we called them, out of the gardens of their innocent youth. As they left the forestwomb of Eden and spread across the earth with their children, we followed them, in the days when Man was young, all over the YES, we followed them." "To them we brought things, ideas for them to explore, puzzles to challenge them to grow, to bring forth in them the fruits of spiritual labor as they brought forth the fruits of beast and branch." The old Stallion's face had screwed up in bitterness as he spoke: "We were the first beasts given a name by Edam, you see, so we loved him for his naming, we loved him to give us a name we could hear on his lips. We loved man." "It came to pass that Edam and Eve gave birth to children named Caine and Abel. They were not the first children of Edam and Eve, but this is another story...the story I tell you was handed down generation upon generation from my people, mouth to mouth, and later, as our numbers dwindled and we fell by the thousands to the traps and snares of the Rude One, we set hand to books to keep the memory, to bring to the children of Edam and Eve and to the children of Caine another lesson. Another inspiration." "The story would have that Caine and Abel brought forth the fruits of their labors, from the branch and from the beast, and they did offer them to the YES as their mother and father had done in the years before them, recalling their connection with the garden they themselves had seen and tended until it was time for them, too, to lose its paradise and move on into the next world of trials." GOD wants you to suffer. It wants to eat your pain. He'd looked up at her then, his Green eyes so terrible...so old...and utterly isolated. "So you know this bit of the story. The story of the first murderer and his victim. It's being repeated to this day. Caine was a planter, and he coaxed fruit from the bough, and grain from the ground, and these he laid on the altar and waited for the acceptance of his gifts to the YES. He lay them there on his pile of stones in their bowls and their baskets..." "He looked to see the sacrifice of his brother, side by side with him, as they'd been in the womb of GOD's mind, and there between them he saw the lightning set fire to a stump betwixt their altars. He'd watched his brother go fetch from the stump a burning brand, and with that, set fire to cook his meat so that the smell of it would please the YES." Story had looked reflexively at the skinny rabbit Dust had been spit roasting over the crackling flames. His eyes had followed hers, and he'd sneered. "But Caine walked to the tree to take his share of the fire, but it went out as he reached for it. While Abel's offering crackled and smoked from the fire he'd gathered from the bush, and it blew its pleasant smell across the field to his brother's nose, Caine saw only that his own pile of offerings were moldering in the sun, rotting." Dust had chuckled, and prodded the dry, crispy rabbit corpse. He'd not bothered to decapitate the animal before he'd spitted it, and now its head, denuded of fur, ears blackened ruins, stared at her with huge, leaking orbs, its teeth made longer by the retraction of its gums in the heat. It looked as though it were screaming at her from hell. She'd stared at him in a stupor, his face colored by the flames, the rabbit by now burnt to blackened charcoal. He hadn't intended to eat it. He'd killed it, spitted it, and cooked it solely for the smell of its flesh. GOD eats your suffering, girl. GOD eats it all. Beyond the circle of the fire...Andrew Corby and Jason Rhode did battle. Furor and Paragon, both Men, one wielding the Rage of GOD, one wielding the unfathomable power of GOD's Will. Which one was Caine? Which one was Able? Steeped in Rage and Self Righteousness, did it matter which? "Andy believes we're meant to bring Hope to ManKind." She'd said in a small voice. "He says humans are special." The ancient Horse brayed with laughter, actually slapping the tops of his thighs with hardened hands so calloused that it sounded like he had gloves on. "And I bet he's a human, ain't he?" Story had looked down. Actually, Andrew Corby, Agent #1165 was a clone. She said nothing. He smelled, tasted, felt, bled, and sweat just as a human born of a flesh and blood womb did. What difference did such a thing make? "What we were made to do was to hurt HuMankind. Hurt him. Goad him. Confound and confuse him. Lead him into perdition." She had felt the tears rushing down her cheeks as Dust spoke. "Because it's only through those things that the Will of GOD actually germinates. Deep within the recesses of his brain lies a singular gland. Every structure in the human brain is duplicate except for this one. Buried under his thoughts, this point in space is the germ body of another Parama. Worlds are born from the minds of HuMans, and if they're taxed in the right way, at the right time, whole universes are born, a process we were meant to midwife, which is why one of us was there when, in a fury at what he saw as the YES's rejection of his offering, Caine shattered the stone of his plow blade and with a shard of it, he crossed the field and murdered his brother on the youth's own altar, alongside the lamb. The idea that GOD would love Abel's sacrifice more than his own was too bitter for the young man to bear. So, Story, one of us was there to witness the very first act of murder in cold blood." He'd looked up at her directly when he spoke, filling her veins with ice water, chilling her down to her very marrow. "Murder inspired by one of us. Murder inflicted on all of HuMankind...by the edict of GOD. Why do you think we are known as Gift Horses, girl? We bring HuMan kind Gifts tied with cords of suffering." "But...Hope-" She started to say, but he cut her off... "Is a delusion, put there to prevent HuMans from self destructing as soon as he realised his entire existance was made solely so he could bleed, sweat, weep, and die. He's right. We do bring Hope. Hope prolongs life. Prolongs and intensifies suffering. Hope obscures the fact that GOD is sustained by HuManity's agony." "The story I just told you never happened. The story I just told you is always being made Real. We are the bearers of The Spiral. Our purpose is to see to it that GOD stays fed. Take from that what you will. GOD does."